Renewed drive to ease sequester

Sen. Tom Harkin says he's looking at Head Start and other programs. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

New York Rep. Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said lawmakers are in a big bind as they face further votes on sequestration fixes. “I voted for the FAA bill, many of us did, but to start picking off one thing and letting the other cuts go just because they don’t have an obvious applause section is a big mistake,” she said.

“The body is going to have fix-it fatigue,” warned Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. “I do know there was grumbling on the floor that we’ll go along with the FAA, but we don’t need this pattern. Because then any federal agency can hold the taxpayers or Congress hostage by shutting down some high-vis[ibility], high-sensitive department and then blackmail us into an adjustment.”

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Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said he also was worried about the precedent that lawmakers are setting by undoing the budget cuts piece by piece. “If you fix one situation, then there will be 10 more and then you basically don’t have a sequester,” he said.

But Roberts said that making these fixes is exactly what members of Congress signed up for, noting as a top priority legislation addressing the cancer drugs. “You can list about five at least, and there’s probably more that we don’t know about,” he said. “It’s like picking the short straws.”

“I think it’s our obligation that when we find situations where the sequester is just egregious that we try to fix it and say look here are some other things that you can do,” Roberts said. “That seems to be on a case-by-case basis right now. Like everybody else, I wish we could fix the sequester but still achieve the spending cuts. Yes, I think Congress will respond.”

Here’s a small sample of other sequester fixes also waiting in the wings: Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) would exempt the NIH; the New York delegation is trying to protect Sept. 11 health and compensation programs; Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) wants to prevent furloughs for members of the National Guard who work full time as uniformed civilians maintaining equipment; Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) hopes to save the TIGER transportation grant program; Reps. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) have a bill to exempt the Indian Health Service fund; Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) would ensure that civilian Pentagon employees who get furloughed don’t lose access to classified information; Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) are releasing a new version of legislation this week that would give agency heads more flexibility in how they implement the budget cuts.

“Congress proved they can deal with one small corner of the pain caused by sequester,” Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said of the FAA bill. “We’re hopeful a broader plan will have the same appeal.”